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Software |
Availability |
Use |
|
GIMP 2.6 |
Freeware |
Used to posterize digital raster images, that is, reduce the palette size to a small number of shades or colors. |
|
RasterSampler 1.0 (Java) |
From the author |
Used to sample pixels and collate data. |
|
URFinder 3.7 (Java) this program |
From the author |
Used to search for solutions to the minimization of expected float entropy and collect observations for efe-histogram. |
|
Excel 2007 |
Microsoft |
Used to generate tables of options over which to search, store outputs and perform statistical analysis. |
|
Minitab 17 |
Minitab Inc |
Statistical analysis. |
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Although URFinder is not restricted to data from digital photographs, the software above might typically be used together in the following way. Having obtained a set of digital photographs, GIMP can be used to reduce the palette size to a small number of shades or colors. This is useful because it reduces the computational cost when using URFinder. The photographs can be desaturated (the colors turned into shades of gray) first if wanting to investigate gray scale images.
RasterSampler can then be used to sample a configuration of pixel locations from each of the digital photographs. The number of pixels and their locations can be set by the user and the resulting data is recorded in a table. You can use copy and paste to copy the data into MS Excel and into URFinder. Excel can then be used to prepare tables containing options over which URFinder can search for solutions, in U and R, to the minimization of expected float entropy. In this case, U gives relationships between the common repertoire of the pixels (e.g. between the different colors) and R gives relationships between the different sampling locations of the sampling configuration used. Details of how to implement a binary search algorithm for finding solutions in U and R can be found in the paper “Quasi-Conscious Multivariate Systems” (published in the journal Complexity in 2015). URFinder also allows you to collect observations of efe, under choosing U and R uniformly at random, in order to plot efe-histograms (i.e. Monte Carlo method). You can copy and paste the results tables into Excel and use Excel to generate the histograms. For further statistical analysis of the data, Minitab or other packages can be used.
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